I have had bugs in software before, but by any standards version 3.7.7 was awful. Just awful. As the saying goes, The road to hell is paved with good intentions. In Beta 2 I tried to put in a tweak related to Suhosin, so I split the options into multiple forms and thought I got it working. The Beta came and went by without alarms, so I submitted the code for approval, and then it proverbially hit the fan. Truth be told I was expecting issues with the TimThumb replacement, and there were a few. But I seriously blew it with regards to the option management, costing people hours of work. Not all people faced issues, mind you – particularly several people who simply upgraded their sites and left it at that. People who are subscribed to my feed knew how to downgrade the release, so that alleviated some concerns. People who had little image jiggery-pokery on their sites (like me) faced literally no issues, because they didn’t have to tweak anything.

But for all the rest, all I can offer you is an apology, and what I hope is a clean version – 3.7.8. If you have bought me a coffee and then realized it was not worth it due to this release, please send me an email through the support forum with a transaction id – I will issue an unconditional refund.

Here is what I have covered in 3.7.8:

Thumbnail issues

If images were not in the template path but in the local directory they were not being picked up and a warning message was being displayed. Thanks a lot to Bob Schecter for an impressive array of websites with a wide range of configurations, which he let me use so that I could track this down.

If the image source was a secure HTTP location (HTTPS, like PicasaWeb), the image was not getting resized. This should be fine now. Thanks to Jürgen for the tip.

Color issues

The first issue was with the color picker. Thanks to various quirks in the use of Farbtastic, I rolled back to something that has been a part of Suffusion since release 2.0 – JSColor. If you now pick a color and save, the change will go through without you having to go through an elaborate charade.

Colors were inconsistently getting prefixed with a “#”. I have made sure that this is no longer the case. Thanks to Kattsby for the tip regarding this.

Option issues

The biggest issue in the previous release was that the buttons to save/reset options had gone rogue and a lot of people have pointed this out. I have made sure of the following:

Clicking “Save” in one screen will not blank out options in another screen.

Clicking “Reset” will not empty the entire theme’s options.

Exporting / Importing will now work.

Another rather intermittent issue was the interference caused by a cookie used by the options panel while attempting to save things. I am only aware of 2 people facing this issue, mind you, and one of them (Mason) has confirmed that this has now been fixed.

A minor issue was that if your options were saved, they needed to be saved twice for the auto-linked CSS to be updated.

Quote characters around font names were being escaped, preventing the font from being loaded.

Some people complained about a slowdown on IE. To counter this, I got rid of the JQuery Uniform script that I was using to make the admin panel look good. I will reconsider this once the changes introduced in this version stabilize.

Miscellaneous issues

There was a bug that was breaking the layout of the Widget Area Above Footer.

There were some issues with the navigation menu’s appearance in the standard skins, particularly with respect to visited items and hover-over items.

Things that are not issues

When something goes wrong, the natural inclination is to assign to it all faults, real and perceived. Something similar happened with the last releases, and because the core faults with Suffusion were so severe, a lot of issues from other places were ascribed to the theme. Not that I blame any of you for it. The following are NOT issues with Suffusion:

If your admin panel stops loading after printing the top bar, the culprit is, in all likelihood a plugin. There is a lot of literature around this on the web, but it bears repeating, particularly because Suffusion’s options panel is more complex and detailed than most other themes’ panels, and having an incorrect script interfering can really mess things up.

A lot of people upgraded to WP 3.1 and Suffusion 3.7.7 at the same time. Now, WP 3.1 uses a new version of JQuery libraries. Some plugins and themes don’t include JQuery the right way. The somewhat correct way to include JS in WordPress is by using the wp_enqueue_script function. The truly correct way to include JS is to use wp_enqueue_script with the right hooks. Here is what I mean:

The problem is that the above will load JQuery potentially twice. Plus you might be loading JQuery after something needs it, thereby resulting in errors. The only situation when this might be required is if you need conditional JavaScript (like something for IE), which is not the case in the above.

If you notice, the only difference with #c is the way the admin_print_scripts hook is used. By appending the options page to it, we are saying that the JQuery script should be used only for this particular plugin’s admin screens.

What has been happening is that a few plugins have followed route b or c above, causing a proliferation of bad JavaScript across the admin pages. With the WP upgrade these plugins now have conflicting JS. This unfortunately causes the correctly coded themes/plugins to break because they rely on the native version of JQuery, which the bad plugin has overwritten on all pages. If you are facing this, you should try deactivating your plugins, then reactivate them one by one to see which one is wrong. If you isolate the broken one, feel free to point the above instructions to the author.

Header height and margin between top of content and top of page: If you had set your options to show a certain header height and margin, please note that the option has moved from Blog Features → Sizes and Margins to Theme Skinning → Header. What has happened as a part of this move is that the control switch has changed. So under Theme Skinning → Header you have to set the options to use “Custom Styles” for the setting to continue to be effective.

Thanks for all of you who had patience with me during the last one week. Thanks are also in order to all of you who provided detailed reports of the issues that you faced. I wish some of you had participated in the beta testing. Apologies if you don’t see your name above – it is just that there were so many people reporting the issues that I couldn’t fit everyone in here.

I am a newbie at this and your owning up to there being issues has healed my self esteem and saved me weeks, even months of berating my feeble mind.

I’ll try to install the upgrade and see how it works out… then if it does, I’ll come back and buy you a cup of delicious, organic, Fair Trade cocoa, with whipped cream and sparkles, just for being so honest!

Sayontan, I think I speak for dozens of us when I say THANK YOU. Thank you for providing this theme, and thank you for the apology. I did suffer as you mention, hours of lost work on 2 sites… but I also understand that I’m using this theme for free… or literally for the price of 2 cups of coffee where I live. I truly appreciate all the efforts you do and I can’t thank you enough for displaying such honesty in your post. Please keep up the good work and reach out if I can help you test anything.

I thought you might want to see the almost-finished product on one of the sites… samcarterart.com

I know how hard it is to write good software and sometimes it just goes wrong, despite all precautions like careful designing, extensive testing, beta releases, etc. There is nothing you can do about it, but to fix it and to communicate about it. And you did both in an excellent way! So, no apologies needed for me, just a big thank you for your hard work! I really hope you enjoy making Suffusion, despite these problems.

Sayontan. Thanks for being so refreshingly upfront about your problems and for all your hard work.

I’ve used your theme for a while now and am still getting to grips with it! Some of my problems may have been due the theme, my understanding of the multitude of options, the transitions and perhaps subsequent bugs through various updates and similarly through WordPress updates, or interactions with plugins….

Anyway, it’s running almost cleanly now apart from a small offset (text & image not centring well) in the featured content bit on the home page, which I can live with.
I had an issue with category pages not showing at all in the transitions through themes 3.75 to 3.77 to 3.78 which overlapped the WordPress upgrade to 3.1 – in the end this way due to a tagging plugin I was using which I’ve disabled and is now undergoing rapid beta-a-day rewrites over the last few days by the author, maury BALMER!

Thanks for your kind comments. I will be looking at making some improvements to the featured content and the magazine template in the coming releases. Hopefully this issue will surface there. Feel free to log a ticket in the support forum for this.

Thanks, Toni. As the snippet on the right says, I am not much of a coffee drinker. But alcohol is completely out of question – haven’t had beer since 9 years, and the last I had any alcohol was a bottle of Inniskillin in early 2009, which happened to be only the second time I had alcohol since 2005. So I stuck to instituting a coffee fund, which essentially funds my hosting space and my fun activities, few of which have anything to do with coffee.

Since I just recently discovered Suffision I didnt have much to worry about when the bugging started in version .5 (or was it .3?). I just reloaded the old version to be able to continue my work, putting my trust on you to solve the issues that needed to be solved.

And you have shown by the way you handled this that you are not only a genius in your field but 100% trustworthy. That is what we, the not so intelligent ones, need!

I look forward to buying you many more coffeecups for this super theme of yours and your brilliant work in the customer care department.

Above all else, thank you for your hard work on this great theme. Whenever there’s a version update, I check your posts to see what’s going on. I saw the mention of bugs with the next-to-previous build and was able to hold out until the fixes were out.

I appreciate your honesty with releases, and for having not only a blog describing in detail the releases and their potential issues, but also a support forum. I know it can take a good chunk of your time.

Thank you so much for your work here Santoyan. I’m so happy with this theme, I appreciate all the time you give to this. I also really appreciate the information you give with each update in an easy to understand format.

Hi Santoyan,I have pasted in the forum of the Traditional Chinese translation.
Please go check the forum recently, where the Japanese translation.
And my website has changed http://sh2153.com/
Name also changed to YILIN.
! Thank you.

Thanx for this.I’d sworn off 3.7.7 and any further upgrades (went back to 3.7.3) until I was sure the problems were fixed ’cause 3.7.7 completely broke my site and when I reverted back I had to rest the WHOLE thing – arrrgh….so this is awesome.

Peter,
If something such as this works in TwentyTen and not in Suffusion it is not an indicator of things being broken on Suffusion. Issues of URLs not being accessible have nothing to do with the theme – they are very dependent on how your permalinks are set up (Suffusion doesn’t touch permalinks, and most themes I know of don’t touch permalinks either). There is probably a conflicting .htaccess file somewhere that is causing permalink issues for you. You might try rewriting your permalinks to resolve this issue. Also try reinstalling the theme – that might help.

I am having trouble gettign the rotating header image-feature to work. Instead of writing it here I recorded my problem and uploaded it to youtube so you can see exactly what my problem is. Can you watch it and then tell me what I am doing wrong?

Hi, Santoyan,
I just want you to know how much I appreciate you rolling out 3.7.8 so quickly. I have been experimenting with suffusion for just a couple months now and I like the granularity that you’ve installed in it. What a great hobby to have I wish I had your coding skills but I have a disability and I work in a state of exhaustion most of the time so my mind is this simply not clear enough to do the coding it would take for me to create my own theme.
I also use Dragon NaturallySpeaking to make suffusion work for me and it does a pretty good job. There is a problem I am having and that is getting the size of the same double right sidebars to stretch out over the entire page. I think I’m doing something wrong but I’m not sure what. But I didn’t ask you to debug my work for me I really wanted to send this as an a Ata boy for your great work.If I ever make any money off of my thoughts believe me I will buy you a cup of coffee maybe even 2. Thanks again for your terrific work. And I’m going to try to figure out what is wrong with my sizing on my own also look at the forms and see if anybody else is that those problems as well.You have made suffusion my hobby as well. I have gotten a lot of joy out of playing with it and seeing what I can create.
Thanks,
Kerry

Thanks for such a killer theme! By far the best I’ve used. I upgraded and everything works fine, except for one thing . . . the thumbnail images on the tile layout pages doesn’t seem to work, and I’ve tried every setting that I can think of to get it to work. In the old version, it just pulled an image out of the post.

Jeff,
I believe I have sorted out all image related issues.
On your site I am not seeing any image tags for the first post. But for the second post I did see something. Do you want me to take a look at it? The trouble may be because of the image location you have in place, but I am not sure.

This should be easy to fix from the options. I had to change the options so that the defaults would not show Pages and Categories. All you need to do is to go to the appropriate menu under Other Graphical Elements, then set them to show all items.

I simply couldn’t be happier with your theme! Just when I think it can’t get any better you go and improve the entire GUI and then rapidly work to make any errors corrected. You truly are a credit to this community. Thanks a TON for all your hard work.

I love this theme! However, I have a little problem that’s driving me crazy. Some of my pages won’t show up in the drop-down menu. Ones I did before I switched to Suffusion do show up. But not the ones I’ve created recently.

There should be three pages showing under A Second Cup. And there should be a page called Here we are after meet an author. They all show up when I activate the default theme and disappear when I reactivate Suffusion.

I don’t know html, but I’ve done everything I can think of to fix this. Deleted and reinstalled Suffusion twice.

Thanks for any help you can give me. We have a bunch of important stuff related to this book happening this week!

The question to ask yourself would be, “How are my menus set up?” If you go to Other Graphical Elements → Main Navigation Bar → Pages in Navigation Bar → Pages in Navigation Bar – All or Selected, you can set that to “Include all, ignoring next option”. That will ensure that all your pages show up in the menu.

Argh! I was searching for something like that and completely missed where it was! Yes, I had originally sent it to not show some of the other pages and so these newer pages hadn’t been checked to show. Thank you SOOOO much! Totally love this theme!

Argh! I was looking all over for a way to tell the nav bar what to do and for some reason never saw that page, even though it was right in front of me! Yes! Now I remember wanting to have some pages not show in the drop down.So obviously when I create a new page, I need to tell it to show. Thanks tons! Love this theme! :0

Terrible things happened to my site when upgrading! I am so happy I took a backup yesterday. This is the backup site http://nettsidemal.no (the way it is supposed to look) and this is my site after upgrading to Version 3.7.8: http://nettsett.no/mal1

Is there anything I can do, or do I need to rebuild my whole site to make it work with Version 3.7.8?

Hi, thank you for the theme, it’s great!
I just upgraded and have an issue with the sidebars look.
I used to have sidebar 1 with the flattened widgets and sidebar 1 (bottom) with the widgets in individual boxes. I would have been happy with a flattened look all round, but the widget pages looses its look in a flattened widget configuration (each page looks like a link – too many underlines).
After the upgrade however, the sidebar (bottom) isn’t in a box anymore. I tried to move the widgets from there to sidebar1 and back to sidebar1 (bottom), but to no avail.
Any suggestion will be welcome.
PS
I may have mistakenly posted this comment in an older upgrade forum, but I am not sure if it went through – if so I apologise.

I finally decided to upgrade Sufusion but the images still aren’t resizing to the dimensions I set. I guess they are automatically resizing or what have you but they aren’t resizing to the dimensions I set and that’s a problem. Before you set the custom image size – pics reset to that – easy – now that’s not happening and I oon’t know how to fix it.

Translations for Suffusion

Translations for multiple languages are available in the Translation Pool. You can use one as-is, or contribute to the pool by improving an existing translation or adding an entirely new one.

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As You Read …

Suffusion is a hobby of mine and I don't work for hire or customize sites using the theme. So please don't contact me for custom work. There are several freelancers out there who can tweak Suffusion to make it work for you.

If you have questions about how to use Suffusion please feel free to use the Support Forum.

As users in the support forum have discovered, there is an issue with Suffusion 4.4.6 […]

Like My Work? Buy Me a Coffee!

Suffusion and Photonic are free. Free for you to use and free for you to modify. But coding takes a lot of time and several late nights, particularly since I work after my regular day job. If you like my work and if you are interested in buying me something, click on the coffee cup below.

A word about the payments. PayPal states that it will charge 30 cents + 4.5% for every payment that I receive. So the mathematics dictate that a payment has to be more than 31.5 cents for me to make any money! Also note that the coffee is symbolic - I am a teetotaler, so I couldn't put up a beer icon, but the money will probably be used for things like hosting space and other such things.

@Sayontan

Copyright & Licensing

Suffusion, Photonic, FontMeister, Suffusion BuddyPress Pack and all snippets of code on this site are distributed under GPL v 3.0. You are free to use and distribute it all, provided the distribution occurs under the same license and my copyright is not violated. Public attribution, though not necessary, is appreciated.